The Lost Testament

90

While Bronson and Angela were waiting until the right time to leave, a meeting of a very different type was taking place only a couple of miles away in a large and secluded house on the eastern outskirts of Madrid.

Four people were discussing the situation, though only three of them were physically present in the room. The fourth man — Antonio Morini — was sitting on a bench at the edge of a park in Rome, his mobile phone pressed to his ear and his face pale and drawn. The news that he had received just moments earlier had been even worse than he had expected, and for the first time since the Vatican’s Internet monitoring system had alerted him to the problem, he was seriously considering telling the Englishman to shut down the whole operation and just walk away, to let events run their natural course, despite the likely consequences.

‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ Morini instructed, in English. He and the men sitting in the house in Madrid had established that as their common language.

‘We were in a very strong position,’ the Spaniard — who was using the name Tobí — replied, his voice cold and bitter. ‘We had traced the two of them to their hotel, and very nearly ended the matter there, but they slipped away and we lost them in the city traffic. We’d already found and seized the third man who’d flown out from London, the specialist in ancient documents, and we were using him as bait to try to pin down the other two people in a location that we could control and where we could recover the relic. Unfortunately, this man Bronson is more resourceful than we expected, and somehow he managed to identify the building where we were holding the other man. He got inside, killed two of my men and knocked out two others, one of whom is still in hospital with severe concussion. The other one is here with me now, and listening to our conversation.’

‘Did he tell you what had happened?’

Morini barely even noticed that ‘Tobí’ was ignoring the rules about not giving names and other details in their conversation.

‘No,’ Tobí replied, ‘he was outside the building when he was attacked, and all he remembers is being knocked to the ground by this man, who then hit him on the head with a weapon, possibly a pistol. By the time he regained consciousness, Bronson was already in the building and the police were on their way. We had assumed that he had called them just before he entered, but I have a contact in the local Guardia Civil who told me that the call was actually made by a woman. Presumably Lewis was with him, outside and watching the building.’

‘And what about the third man, the man from London? What happened to him?’

‘He was still in the building when the police arrived, and he’s now in hospital too, recovering. Some of the methods we used to interrogate him were quite — what shall we say? — robust.’

‘I don’t need to know about that,’ Morini said quickly.

‘I will tell you one other thing: I will make this Bronson pay. One of the men he killed was my brother.’

‘I don’t want this turning into a personal vendetta. The most important thing is still the recovery of the relic.’

Tobí gave a short and entirely mirthless laugh.

‘What you want, monsignor, and what I now want are not necessarily the same thing,’ he said. ‘If there’s any possibility of us getting the relic back, then we will. But right now, this is personal. We are going to find Bronson and Lewis, and then I’m going to make sure that both of them wish they’d never been born.’

Even through the earpiece of his mobile phone, Morini could feel the ice-cold determination in the man’s voice.

Moments later, Tobí ended the call and looked across his desk at the two men who had been waiting silently there, listening to the conversation.

‘Do we have any idea where those two are now?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Santos, the man Bronson had tackled in the warehouse car park, replied. ‘We know Bronson hired a car at the airport here, and all of our watchers have been given details of the vehicle as well as the photographs and descriptions of Bronson and Lewis, but there has been no sighting of them so far. They might have gone to ground in Madrid, in some small hotel maybe, or they might have driven away from the city altogether. If they have left the city by car the net will have to be so big that they might easily slip through it. We simply don’t have the manpower to cover every road all the time.’

Tobí stood up and walked across to one wall of his study, where an old map of the Iberian Peninsula was displayed. For a few seconds, he just looked at it, trying to decide the best course of action. How would he get out of Madrid if he were in Bronson’s shoes, guessing at the forces that would be ranged against him?

He looked at the image of Madrid, and the surrounding areas, assessing whether or not the two fugitives would risk trying to board an aircraft or a train. If they purchased an airline ticket, one of his contacts in the immigration service would know. Their two passports had already been red-flagged, and he had positioned surveillance teams at the Madrid airports and train stations.

But somehow he doubted if they would use either route. From what little he knew about Bronson, he guessed that the man would want to keep his options open, and that suggested that there was only one possible way he would be considering getting out of Spain.

Tobí tapped the glass covering the map a couple of times, then turned back to face the two men sitting opposite him.